Thursday, July 20, 2006

Choosing your battles

First the good news. My cyber-freund Gordon Cook, who I think is probably genuinely the hardest working man in telecom research, has started a blog. Now the bad news. He has uncovered a legal wrangle brewing between Level(3) and Qwest in the western US which may make the Net Neutrality debate look like a silent movie pie fight when all is said and done:

"Net Neutrality is a skillful diversion to draw our attention there while Qwest, ATT, Verizon and BellSouth stick the knife in at the court and PUC level and kill off the remaining services they don’t control. The crying shame is that no one knows what is going on outside a very very narrow circle of people."

This is something which telecom industry (if indeed there really is a telecom industry) bears like myself must constantly remind themselves of: technology may move rapidly and we may pat one another on the back for all the innovation happening at the edge, but there are still weapons lying at the back of the telco arsenal, and they are litigation and competitor-attrition supported by massive legacy cash flows. Looks like I should get on the blower to Johnny Debacle and see if we can get some RBOCs added to Satan's Portfolio...